The queer little man

Four children sat around a large room which was empty of all furniture except wooden packing cases, in attitudes that indicated their various temperaments. Prue Wayne, twelve ye...

Mark was sawing on the side of a packing case, making a cheerful whistling through his teeth, but the saw was slender; it swayed and bent a good deal, and the course it had so f...

Mark was not much less excited. It really was an amazing thing to come home from the post office with a horse and buckboard, “precisely as if it had been sent parcel post,” Mark...

“So am I,” Isabel agreed. “He thinks and thinks, not pleasant thoughts. He frowns and looks straight through you as if you were cheesecloth, and he is pale. You don’t suppose he...

“Isa, child, do you realize that you and I are growing to be merely calling acquaintances? That you are gone all day long, after your practice and reading are done, and that we...

Dolly and Kathie did not appear the next day. “The Lucky Four” had been sure that they would come, they were so delighted with the idea of the club and so anxious to belong to it.

Mr. Lindsay looked up from his paper with a laugh in his eyes; they were at breakfast and Isabel had followed up her announcement by corking her lips with the biggest, most lusc...

“They ought to be ten cents a bunch. Everything is twice as much as it was, and think what it would cost to go around peddling them if you had a car, when gasoline is so high! Y...

“Could we hear what you are going to tell, Mr. Burke?” asked Poppy. Her sharp little face almost looked as though it had been whittled, so much was its natural pointedness incre...

Isabel had not found relief, as Prue had, in tears while the scene with Kathie and Dolly was enacted. She kept from crying till she poured out the story of the quarrel to her mo...

“Oh, dear, dear!” sighed Isabel watching the retreat of Kathie and Dolly, who stalked away so wrathily that “they looked as if their backs were calling names,” Isabel said. “The...

“You’re to come home with Poppy and me, Isa and Prue; Motherkins said so,” said Mark. “She was going to call up your mothers, and ask them to let you stay to supper. She said we...

Mr. Hawthorne looked at his mother, she at him, and Mr. Burke gave his wife a startled look which he tried to change into a careless one and carry on to the sideboard, as if he...

“Whoa, there!” shouted Mr. Burke when he espied the children standing at the side of the road. He pulled in his horse so suddenly that he threw the reliable beast back on his ha...

“‘Oh, Oysters,’ said the Carpenter, ‘You’ve had a pleasant run! Shall we be trotting home again? But answer came there none-- And this was scarcely odd, because They’d eaten eve...

“I feel as though we’d all been hung up to die, and some one had come along and cut every single rope, just as we were going to squirm our last squirm,” she said, which graphic...